Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons

Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons.

I was just barely following the plot in this, the fifth of the six Lone Wolf and Cub films. Ogami Itto has to assassinate an abbot delivering a scroll, intercept the scroll, and make sure it gets to a certain person, except that person may or may not be the right person, and in addition he has to kill some more people, something something something. Early on there is an entirely detachable episode in which little Daigoro gets involved in a pickpocket's escape, and has to be flogged publicly in an attempt to shame the pickpocket into confessing--while his father watches impassively from the crowd! Daigoro's a tough little junior assassin, and takes it like a man.

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The DVD "extras" feature has trailers for several other samurai films, including Lady Snowblood (1973), which looks like a must-see. Check out the inventive subtitling here:

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades

Akihiro Tomikawa and Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

More literally, "Perambulator Against the Winds of Death." I really don't know what to say about these Baby Cart movies. They're masterfully put together, and always gripping, but the codes--both filmic and ethical--are often opaque to me. Sometimes I get caught up in the unflagging emphasis on samurai honor before it occurs to me that this honor is depicted in an utterly incoherent way. Sometimes Ogami Itto steps in and does chivalrous things for damsels in distress (mostly prostitutes), and sometimes he just stands there with that sour, blank expression on his face (yes, it's both sour and blank) and watches the bad guys raping and killing innocent women. And there's just so much rape. Rape, rape, rape. Rape and killing. Lots of killing. Killing and honor. Every once in a while, when there's a lull in the carnage, li'l Daigoro looks around in wonder at scenes of natural serenity and beauty. At least I think it's wonder; his gaze is as blank and pitiless as his father's.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

Or "Perambulator of the River of Sanzu." Sword of Vengeance and this film were edited down into one movie and redistributed in 1980 as Shogun Assassin. More stirring samurai adventure as Ogami Itto and son Daigoro battle a troop of female warriors and the "Gods of Death": three brothers who use various metal hand attachments to dispatch their enemies with maximum gore. As with the first film, the appeal is largely in the dramatic contrast between the ultraviolence of the fight scenes and the tender (but desentimentalized) relationship between father and son. I'm still trying to get a fix on Misumi's approach to gender and sexuality: in particular, he has some weirdly ambivalent and perhaps arrested feelings about breasts.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance

Tomisaburo Wakayama in Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (dir. Kenji Misumi, 1972).

I like the literal English title better: Wolf with Child in Tow: Child and Expertise for Rent.

This is the first of six films in the Kozure Ôkami series, adapted by screenwriter Kazuo Koike from his immensely popular manga series. I'm not a samurai film aficionado (yet), so I'll leave it to someone else to chart the influence of these films and ones like them on Tarantino's Kill Bill, which features similar balletic dismemberments and squirting firehose-streams of blood. That is, I don't know if these were the first films in this genre with this particular garish visual style and spaghetti-western-tinged music, but they certainly are impressive. Tomisaburo Wakayama is Ogami Itto, a Ronin or renegade samurai, whose wife is murdered by some Shogun faction or other (I don't even know if I'm using any of these words right), whereupon he hits the road as an assassin for hire, pushing his son Daigoro along with him in a wooden baby cart. His face is stolidly inexpressive at all times, which makes him seem very expressive. And little Daigoro is pretty much the same way, in addition to being so darned cute. When we first meet him, he is being snatched up by an insane woman who force-breastfeeds him while his father stands by patiently. Starting to get an idea of the weirdness here? But, while it is weird, it would be misleading to suggest that the entire thing is a big long kinkfest. For the most part, it's classical narrative film in the adventure tradition, with all the familiar attending humanist themes of nobility and fatalistic grace, tweaked toward a bizarre sado-eroticism ever so slightly.

In this first installment, the events described above occur, and then Ogami Itto takes an assignment that places him in a small village held hostage by a bunch of pirate-like guys who are in some way relevant to the assignment in question, but I'm not sure exactly how. While there, Ogami Itto obeys these guys' orders to have sex with an attractive prostitute, an act she perceives as extremely chivalrous and selfless, which, in context, it is. Why? Doesn't matter. There ensues lots of swordplay and leaping and geysers of blood. Fwwooooooshhhhhh.